Just hear those sleighbells ringaling, Please turn off the Christmas Music.

The Christmas season is in full force on our little island home. I like Christmas as much as the next guy but there is just something not quite right about an 85 degree December. All the businesses have their halls decked with holly, the Nativity on top of Ace Hardware is massive and impressive, and Trieste saw a shirtless black Santa in board shorts as a decoration. Ho Ho Ho, I love it all. But I don't like Christmas music, call me a Grinch, but it's irritating. All those years of working retail probably. Oh well three weeks to go.

So we had our first Micronesian thanksgiving, or I should say our first Thanksgiving in Micronesia, because this is not a Micronesian Holiday as lot's of people pointed out to me. Even if the College Campus on Chuuk got the day off, I'm not bitter because we went to TWO Thanksgivings, one on Thursday and one the following Saturday. We had all the standards, Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie, because apparently you can import just about anything. After the Saturday Thanksgiving we went to a variety show. Our People we know here did a lot of crazy and silly things and it was fun, more or less. I didn't do anything because my talent for annoying Trieste doesn't really translate to a audience situation, even if my art is superb.

I feel like I have more to say, but that's it.
jp

I heart Kitti.

Yes, we moved. For a month we'd been whining to anyone who would listen about how badly we wanted to move, but what it took was saying, just once, that we wanted to move somewhere not by other mehn wai (that's you, whitey). As soon as that flag was dropped, the most beautiful house was just handed to us, and we got the world's greatest neighbors along with it. (Don't think we didn't try looking ourselves--we did--but the thing is is that the only folks who are advertising housing are trying to reach mehn wai, and therefore were no good to us. But we tried.) Since we don't have addresses on this little island, our new house is "the Pink House, in Dien," and people usually know what we're talking about. The commute to Kolonia seems long to locals (it's 7 miles). We had to buy a car to do it--let me tell you about our car. It was made in 1995--think about how old that is, how many days that car's been driving. Now. It has 60,000 miles on it. That is why 7 miles seems like a far distance. Also, our car has a racing wheel and three nifty (gigantic) decals (I won't spoil the surprise--someday I'll have a connection that will allow me to post photos of it). Also, the steering wheel's on the wrong side of the car. This makes it hard (impossible) to see around corners (which, the circular island road, on which we live, is made only out of corners) and all the corners invariably have children/drunken teenagers/sakau-lo'd old guys/dogs/giant rats/crazy school children flailing around in the road at the end of them. Almost all the cars on the island have steering wheels on the wrong side. I vote we just start driving on the left side of the road, for the love of god.

Our immediate neighbors are a really beautiful family. They sure bailed us out with that gigantic pig thing, and also it seems like every time we're feeling too tired and down to take care of ourselves, someone comes over bearing a giant plate of food for us. They bring us food a lot, and we try to reciprocate. In desperation, once I'd accumulated more of their dishes and platters than we owned ourselves, I sent over a platter of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I cut them into little triangles! It was the best I could do. That night they sent over a beautifully prepared whole fish, filleted on a bed of rice and topped with a long thing that was either a giant clam or the tongue of a possibly mythical beast. It didn't look like a clam part.

On the other side of our house is a sakau market that makes the strongest sakau I've ever tasted--instant numbness of the lips, tongue, and throat. The regulars are a hilarious and super sweet bunch of people, and Jonathan and I are always trying to make time to go sit with them.

Behind our house is a creek, and across the road from our house is...nothing. It's wonderful.

I could go on and on about our new neighborhood. We love it. I was reading one of the letters left for us by last year's volunteers, and one piece of advice given especially to College of Micronesia-Pohnpei volunteers was: "At COM and Kolonia you will be daily exposed to the worst the culture of Pohnpei has to offer. Get away from the college, spend time out of Kolonia, or you will end up hating Micronesia." I have to say, after a month in the boonies, we are so much more relaxed about living here, and I can easily see staying longer than this year. Our new house is just up the road from COM-National, at which I am teaching a Chemistry class (lecture and lab!) next semester. I. Am. So. Excited. I saw my new office/workspace/classroom the other day, and it is all wonderful...chemicals, computers, books boooks booooooooks, and the students are the absolute best that Micronesia has to offer. I'll still be teaching full time at COM-Pophnpei, but hey, I live in Kitti now. I can handle a little extra workload. Especially if it means teaching college chemistry.

Here's what else is good about Pohnpei: gecko noises (they growl!), skinks (are beautiful), giant bats, kittens all over the place, food growing outside your windows, green green crazy green vines-trees-mountains-grass-moss everywhere, "water features," random volcano remnants, snorkeling, the reef, atolls on the reef, flowers year-round, and the sky. Pardon my french, but what the hell is up with the sky here? Even on my home-sickiest days, the sky is always the prettiest thing I've ever seen. What happens to the sky? Is it the equator? The island? What the hell?

Anyway, I'll sign off now before I say anything else optimistic. You know I hate that.
Love,
Trieste

A few weeks ago we went to a giant feast for the Nahmwarki, which is like our State, Kitti's, cheif. They killed something like 15 pigs, people brought hundreds of pounds of yams, tons of sakau (that narcotic drink). There were speeches and then the Nahmwarki handed out portions of the pigs and food and stuff. For some reason someone handed me a quarter of a pig. The back ribs and the hind leg. We had to put it on an inflatable raft in the trunk of my car for a long time before the party was over. Then everyone starts dancing and ladies come by and rub coconut oil on your arms and neck, give out gifts to everyone, I got a a towel and some Che Guvarra flip flops, Trieste got a hair thing that we think might be chicken feathers and a skirt with designs from Tonga or Fiji on it.

I won't even pretend to understand all the things that happened, but it was one of the best things we've been able to do here.

OH, then I had to have my neighbor show me how to carve a pig with a machete. It was awesome. Unfortunately, my years of school never told me that I was cutting out the bacon...we lost the bacon ;( But we ate pork like it was going out of style for a week, Ballin out of control.

jp

Adventurers and Adventuresses

Kolonia, Kolonia, God shed his grace on thee. But we had to leave that little harping magpie of a city for fairer pastures in that great municipality of Kitti. In case you were wondering our village is called Dioan and nobody's sure if it's in Sokehs or Kitti because the Nahmwarki's disagree about the boundary lines. As Saxon so eloquently stated, however, nobody knows what the hell we're talking about...so there you go.

But like I said we moved, we love our new house, and it's my idea of perfection. The house has a water catchment system that collects rainfall from the roof a puts it in a 2000 gallon container. We have zero water pressure because they put the tank only slightly higher than the plumbing. I thought everyone new that you have to have some elevation in order to have high pressure, but you can never count on anyone knowing anything. That might be one of Coglan's laws. Due to the water pressure issue, we have to take bucket baths and flush the toilet with a bucket (not at the same time). Both of these things takes practice but I'm definitely getting the hang of it.

We also don't have a stove, which doesn't bother Trieste but I'm finding it kind of difficult. I do have two portable butane burners which so far is really all I need, but I really want a toaster oven to round out the mix of appliances.

Also, some of the lights don't work. Only the lights in the bedrooms and the bathroom. I'm not sure why, so far I don't care, but I wish that I'd taken better notes when I was an Electrician for NASA.

Also, we have several fruit trees near the house, lime, three kinds of coconut, breadfruit, banana, papaya, giant swamp taro, a kind of mango that's crunchy and peppery. We are just waiting for things to get ripe.

So long,
JP

When you know you're doing a great job

I've been teaching remedial English for three months now. It's been a challenge but I feel like I'm doing a good job. And then I get this for a one paragraph essay on health...

"What are some ways that people stay in shape?

The people can write the shape of your face and color of the shape. Shape is what you like or what is the beautiful in your eyes. The color in your eyes is beautiful. Shape for something beautiful. The Shape of the house. The shape of the earth and the globle warming. The something you buy the shape you looked first. Then you liked it. The shape look like a square or a blue sky."

Actually, now that I've read this paragraph a few times, I am starting to see some sort of logic in it. It's like a secret code. This student is trying to tell me something, and I'm too stupid to figure it out. The shape of the house. The color of the shape. The shape of a blue sky. WHAT DOES IT MEAN?

When it rains...and other cliches.

So I guess that Trieste and I are on the same wavelength about the blog situation and how it's been a long time. My only contention with what Trieste posted was the caption next to Kolonia. Kolonia is that small and beautiful and if you come and visit us we will take you to our lagoon side villa where we have a Dolphin for a butler and Sea turtles will sing you to sleep.

Actually we as in I have taken to calling Pohnpei Temptation Island but not for the reasons you may think and not for reasons that I'm going to go into right now. Mysterious enough for you?

ON TO THE NEWS:
News item number one: We think the trade winds have started up but we've thought that every few weeks because it'll cool off to 80 degrees and seem like it'll snow any second and the next day it'll be one hundred with humidity.

News item number two: A few nights ago we went to see our host family for the first time in a long time and we got to watch a disney channel show which took me an hour to figure out. Here's what I learned... teenagers are awkward and gross and Miley Cyrus is Hannah Montana but with a wig or something. Floyd "Oh my god I forgot" Doses who is our host brother quoted both episodes of this strange show from beginning to end. Every time I looked away he hit me and told me to watch. That guy is a riot.

News item number three:
Stop what your doing, stop reading this and wasting time on the computer. Get in your hot little hot rod and drive to the nearest dairy. Ask to speak with the owner of the dairy and make sure it's a mom and pop operation and not some weird multinational conglomerate of dairy cattle owners who live in France or some bullshit. So ask to speak with the dairy farmer and when he comes up, kiss him or her right on the mouth and say "thank you for making cheese and milk and sour cream and butter that isn't expired." Because when it all goes to shit and we don't have fresh heavy whipping cream year round, you will wish that you had. That being said our saintly friend Mike brought us Tillamook Sharp Cheddar cheese and sour cream from Guam! I don't know how that happened...and frankly I don't care. Was it sustainable?...hell no... but I ate a cheese sandwich and put sour cream on my lentils so I'm all good.

Well...that's it.
jp

Some photos of things we did a long time ago

A while ago we mentioned that Lenard, our favorite baby, turned one. And we loved his party. We had "Phillipino style pig," which means we ate a whole pig, and all the youngest kids (and Jonathan and Trieste) got a big kick out of the creepy face, which was thus:

Don't feel bad if you look at that and don't immediately think "food," or if you think other things also. It's not that you're not cosmopolitan or culturally sensitive enough. We all loved the pig head. AJ got entertained by his mom for awhile by getting whirled in near the pig face and then pulled, screaming and laughing, back away from it. That might have been my favorite part. Anyway, shrieky pigs' heads can be entertainment AND food, is what I'm saying, as long as you're not trying to be cool and culturally sensitive. Obviously, Jonathan and I took photos of the food and shrieked along with AJ, so we were being neither.


I keep trying to upload a close-up, but the Internet and/or Photoshop won't let me. So you'll have to Photoshop it yourself. We should have a contest! Who can do the most creative/creepy thing with a close-up photo of a pig's head? The winner gets 10% of my daily salary and blog glory. And maybe a special spot in heaven for entertaining me while I'm this bored.

Here is Lenard playing with the toy we got him for his first birthday. It's tradition, we found out, to give kids clothes on their first birthdays, so we committed a mild faux pas by bringing him a Strawberry Shortcake jingly ball. But the ball was fun.

Oops! No photo of Lenard for you! It won't upload.

A while ago, Jonathan and I also took a boat trip along the length of the island. Here is Kolonia from the lagoon:






Kolonia is bigger and dirtier than it looks from the lagoon, but not much bigger.

Here is what we look like at the end of a day on a boat:

I am not trying to do anything, by wearing a towel on my head, other than keep the damn sun off my exposed skin. The sun is just so much background info until you come to the equator.

I will try to upload one more photo. This is Sokehs Rock, the "Diamond Head of Pohnpei." Pohnpei draws lots of comparisons to Hawaii, which is awesome. Anyhow, Sokehs Rock is really pretty and you can see if from EVERYwhere, and everyone loves it, just like Diamond Head:

I don't think the photo will upload...Maybe from school, maybe next time.

This past weekend Jonathan and I went with a few friends to a fresh water waterfall...It was a double waterfall, with a 20-foot waterfall falling into an almost perfectly round pool that was ideal for swimming in (and jumping 20 feet into), and then from there it fell another 35 or 40 feet to another pool that was ALSO great for swimming. The best thing about these waterfalls is that they are within walking distance of our house. I'd show you pictures but 1) our friend lost his waterproof camera in the lower waterfall, and 2) they wouldn't upload anyway. But it was a good day. We invented a new game, called "Throw a Rock at a Rock and Try to Make it Hit Another Rock." We played it for a long time. We also played, "See What Trash You Can Find at the Bottom of the Pool." We found a car battery and a lawn mower motor; that was also fun. Too bad we couldn't find the camera.

The last few days since the waterfalls have been a struggle between life and death...When we first moved here, our Field Director told us that there was "a lot of life." This means, really, there's also a lot of death. Two days ago a dead cockroach fell out of my coffee pot first thing in the morning. Yesterday a gecko caught a cockroach and left its parts all over the living room. This morning a swarm of ants managed to kill a roach and they're still dismantling it in the hallway (far be it from me to interfere!), and this afternoon Jonathan accidentally shut another gecko in the back door. It crawled to the window, stuck itself to the sill, and then it died, still sticking to the window. Awesome. Also! The constant flood in our kitchen and hallway (did I tell you about that? Our hallway and kitchen are constantly flooded--I mean, they splash. It's because our fridge sucks, but our landlord insists it's because I don't stay home and clean enough) has proven to be an ideal place for mosquitos to lay eggs. We are now tormented, all night, every night. Tormented. I've bleached the floors twice in two days, and it's helped moderately. Any advice?

That's it! I've been trying to upload this blog for three days. That's why it's so long.

Love,Trieste